The Walking Dead season 3 will be taking the survivors to the prison, as was teased at the end of last season, and will be introducing Michonne (officially) and the Governor, along with bringing back Merle Dixon.

Walking DeadSeason 3 Spoilers

According to The Wrap, showrunner Glen Mazzara has made it clear that “there is no safe haven in this world. I want to make that clear. At the end of our season 2 finale that farm is overtaken and that farm was that last safe haven, and there’s no safe haven in that world. I want to be very clear about that. No one is safe. There is no safe haven.” Considering where they’re headingÂ—the prisonÂ—and who’s being introducedÂ—the GovernorÂ—safety could very well become a foreign concept to the survivors for quite a while. They had their time at the farm, Carl was able to heal, and their group expanded, but they’ve lost some along the way and they’ll likely lose more in season 3. It’s just a matter of who will die, not if someone will die on this show.

The Walking Dead season 3 is going to show the survivors moving to the prison, which Mazzara has called “a threatening, malevolent character.” He went on to say, “It is a challenge to live in the prison. And I think we’ve really been able to get a lot of story out of it. So it will not feel like a safe corner keeping our characters away from central action. It will really play that they are in a shark cage. Life in a prison is life in a shark cage.” The group isn’t exactly united right now as it is. The second season ended with Rick declaring that it was no longer a democracy (leading to “Ricktatorship”) and that is something that needs to be addressed when the series resumes in the fall. The prison is going to be an unknown place for them, and with what they have coming up, they’re going to need to figure out how to work together despite their differences and the differences of opinion about how things should be run.

The Governor will also be introduced, already teased in photos like the one above, and all Mazzara would say is “he makes a surprising appearance” and viewers “wont have to wait too long” to see him. He didn’t give away if it would happen in the season 3 premiere, but it does seem likely that if not then (perhaps in the final scene), it will happen in at least the second or third episode. The Governor coming to the television series is something fans are highly anticipating, so it doesn’t seem like that’s something they’ll hold off on. The showrunner added, “We’re interested in having a very complex, nuanced, multi-layered character. This will not be simply an arch villain who is committing an evil act in every scene. That’s too cartoonish for what we do here. We want that character to feel as real and human and fully developed as possible.” It seems like David Morrissey will be bringing quite the character to life in the show’s third season.

Mazzara did call “this Governor-Michonne-Woodbury-prison storyline…a longterm arc” and “what equals The Walking Dead.” The third season is going to be 16 episodes, so it seems like this should be making up most, if not all, of it. Could it last into season 4 (assuming there is one) as well?